Although best known for its music, Nashville is a city filled with many dining destinations. Some of the more popular types of local cuisine include hot chicken, hot fish, barbecue, and meat and three. Thanks, in part, to Nashville’s foodie culture, the city was ranked as the 13th “snobbiest” city in America according to Travel + Leisure magazine.
Below is a quick-and-dirty analysis of restaurant’s Yelp ratings in Nashville, TN area. It is intended to inform AGA conference attendees of the best dining options this city has to offer.
We performed the following steps in our analysis:
The resulting data set contains information on
Yelp users assign a rating based on a scale of 1 (worst) to 5 (best) Stars. The histogram below shows that the ratings distribution is skewed towards positive with a long negative tail and a median rating around 3.5 to 4 Stars.
| Min. | 1st Qu. | Median | Mean | 3rd Qu. | Max. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 3 | 3.5 | 3.492 | 4 | 5 |
The map below allows to zoom-in on individual ZIP codes to find out where the best-rated restaurants are concentrated.
This wordcloud represents the frequency counts of restaurant categories in the city of Nashville. The cloud is split into four quartiles by level of Yelp Rating. It shows which types of restaurants tend to be highly rated by Yelp users and vice-versa.
Nashville hot chicken is a type of fried chicken that is a local specialty of Nashville, Tennessee, in the United States. In its typical preparation, it is a portion of breast, thigh, or wing that has been marinated in a water-based blend of seasoning, floured, fried, and finally sauced using a paste that has been spiced with cayenne pepper. It is served atop slices of white bread with pickle chips.
There are many restaurants in Nashville that serve a variant of the dish, and there is a city-wide festival and competition commemorating it. The popularity of hot chicken has spread beyond the Southern United States due to the influence of Nashville’s music industry.
Don’t leave Nashville without sampling this unique dish form one of the restarants highlighted below.
We calculated restaurants rankings based on a combination of Yelp ratings, number of reviews and frequency of ‘hot chicken’ mentions in user reviews.
Nashville has a vibrant music and entertainment scene spanning a variety of genres. As the city’s name itself is a metonym for the country music industry, many popular tourist sites involve country music. Numerous music clubs and honky-tonk bars can be found in downtown Nashville, especially the area encompassing Lower Broadway, Second Avenue, and Printer’s Alley, which is often referred to as “the District”.